Leadership Quote by Joe Slovo

Slovo’s sentence performs a grim political balancing act: it mourns civilian deaths while simultaneously sanding down the moral edge of responsibility. The opening clause, “I think it is tragic,” is deliberately personal and restrained, a gesture toward human feeling that costs little in policy terms. “On any side” widens the frame into symmetry, implying that suffering is evenly distributed and therefore ethically harder to assign. It’s a classic move in conflict rhetoric: compassion without culpability.

Then comes the pivot, introduced by “But,” where tragedy is converted into inevitability. Calling it “almost a cliche” is not casual; it preemptively disarms critique by suggesting that anyone insisting on accountability is naively repeating predictable moral language. “Virtually unavoidable” does the heavier work: it naturalizes civilian casualties as a byproduct of history, not of choices, tactics, or command structures. The subtext is institutional self-protection dressed as realism.

The final phrase, “this isn’t unique to us alone,” is the most revealing. It’s less an argument than a bid for normalization: if everyone does it, then condemnation becomes selective, even hypocritical. In the context of Slovo’s role as a senior ANC/SACP strategist during a period when armed struggle and state repression blurred into cycles of retaliation, the line reads as an attempt to hold onto moral high ground while accepting the moral injury of insurgency. It’s not denial; it’s mitigation. The rhetoric seeks permission to keep fighting without being defined by the bodies that inevitably follow.